Open Stack Training London

Posted by Wes Thompson

Last week our CTO Steve Nice attended the official OpenStack training course in central London. With this fantastic open source project released on the 17th of April, we at Reconnix are putting ourselves at the forefront of this emerging technology.

As the first ever UK Amazon Web Services partner, we pride ourselves on being a well respected key player in AWS implementations, we aim to repeat that success and are on track to be recognised as the UK’s leading technical authority on OpenStack. Steve describes his experiences and vision for this great open source project.

“It’s very early days for OpenStack, it’s almost reminiscent of Linux 15 years ago, everyone is loving the technology, but what is it’s use and what are the biggest barriers to entry? As well as learning implementation details of the technology, I was keen to understand these two critical business questions.

The biggest immediate problem is that it’s updated too frequently, and there are lot of backwards compatibility breaks. I think on balance, to accelerate the technology this is probably a necessary evil, but it’s still frustrating. Some of my coursemates were attending from the Netherlands and commented that they were out of date already. So from my point of view, with the addition of bleeding edge technology such as Software Defined Networking you really need to maintain two platforms; one for the latest stable version, and one dedicated to R&D for the version in the pipeline.

In the next version (dubbed Ice House) due for release on the 17th of April, a new feature for provisioning fresh servers via PXE boot will be deployed giving the architect the option to fire up bare metal machines from scratch. This is particularly important as virtualisation doesn't work for all applications and not everything can be clouded. The process is essentially the same as spinning up an image for virtualisation but having luxury for bare metal servers is a significant game-changer.

There were six of us on the course and the pace was excellent. Despite the high levels of complexity, the pitching of the material was spot on. The only thing I did notice was that as the networking is SDN, it’s incredibly complex, and was reflected in my scores in the mini-quizzes at the end of each module (95% normally and 56% for SDN)

The trainer from Marantis was over from France but his English was perfectly easy to understand and did a very good job of laying out the detail. Marantis are leading an open source project called fuel and really helping drive the technology forward.

So, the main features of the Open Stack are currently:

  • Nova: The powerful compute engine originally developed by NASA.
  • Neutron: Which provides the tools for implementing the SDN.
  • Cinder & Swift : Take care of both object and block storage respectively.
  • Keystone is authentication service that's pulls all these services together in a secure manner.

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So it’s nice and modular, and unlike something like Eucalyptus, you can choose whichever elements you think are suitable for your architecture. For example, you could just use Swift as you might use Amazon S3

I think it’s worth noting that the complexity of Neutron has grabbed the attention of Cisco. If hardware networking devices are on their way out in favour of virtualisation then that threatens their business, but wisely they have just invested one billion dollars into research into OpenStack and no doubt their considerable expertise will be used to develop powerful virtual networking devices.

For Reconnix, I see this being at the core of our future cloud offering and I’m keen to get all our teams trained up so we can start deploying this technology to help our clients with their ever increasing business challenges.

Heartbleed: What happens when people don’t work properly.

Posted by Wes Thompson

Heartbleed: What happens when people don’t work properly.

Heartbleed has captured the public’s imagination and drawn lots of attention to open source, some of it good, some of it bad. First of all, open source was not the cause of this bug, the cause of all bugs will always be the same. People.

The key to this bug and understanding the fallout is identifying the lessons to be learned and appreciating just how much the open source approach has limited the damage caused by humans being human.

People are fallible and always will be, we need to find ways to cater for that fallibility.
Where there are methods to help us with our fallibility, we need to properly apply them.

There is an ever evolving science of testing software. Initially developers themselves simply responded to user’s bug reports and fixed the issues as they arose. The days of using users as testers are for the large part behind us and now more robust testing is focussed on bug prevention rather than bug fixing. The problems arise when software is inadequately tested and Heartbleed falls into this category.

At Reconnix, we develop software in a quality-focussed way and employ over-arching strategies such Test Driven Design (TDD) and unit testing as well as functional and user testing. However, none of these methods would have exposed Heartbleed, what is required for high security software is lengthy fuzz testing. Fuzz testing is typically used for testing closed-source software as it makes no assumptions as to how the code is written it simply bombards the inputs of the software with large amounts of random and unexpected data and then monitors the software for crashes, memory leaks, and in Heartbleed’s case unexpected output.

So while ever humans are still writing code, we will need robots to test it.

Apprenticeship Week 2014: How it can work for you

Posted by Wes Thompson

The beginning of the month marked National Apprenticeship Week in the UK, a drive to make both businesses and young people aware of the mutual benefits apprentice programmes can bring. As a business, Reconnix has benefitted greatly from apprenticeships programmes, and we’ve helped to build careers for a number of young people over recent years.

While university is obviously a great opportunity for many, there is perhaps now too much pressure to drive everyone towards third level education as soon as they finish their A Levels. Employers can be guilty of overlooking candidates without third level qualifications, a degree isn’t the be all and end all.

There are many reasons why university might not be a suitable option for a school leaver. Not everyone is academically focused, some have a more practical mindset. For others it is out of their reach financially – for all the progress made in the UK in terms of access to education, fees remain a barrier to many.

Apprenticeships provide an opportunity for young people to develop while in paid employment. Getting to grips with practical skills on the job is perhaps one of the best ways to learn, and it can be rewarding for both the apprentice and employer alike.

We hired our first apprentice at Reconnix six years ago and he is now our Operations Manager – a highly respected and core member of our team. This encouraged us to take on more, and the two apprentices with us now are currently showing great promise and are in the process of becoming great technicians – already proving great value to the team.

We would encourage all businesses to take on apprentices, and help remove the stigma around not going to university. UK PLC is missing a huge raft of talent out there – all that is needed is to give them a chance. So if you can, open that position now, there is nothing more rewarding than helping someone out at the start of their career and watching them develop into an invaluable asset to your business.